the zoo
I recently visited a zoo with my children, and I observed my six year old document the experience afterwards, in the car on the way home, in a drawing. After ten minutes of independently working on it, we were all encouraged to call out the animals we remembered seeing, so that they could all end up on the drawing. It made me return to the idea that drawing makes us recall, remember, learn, think about, explore ideas. Why do children draw?
The next day, I went back to Eileen Adams’ ‘Drawing to learn, learning to draw’ (2013), a really useful paper discussing the use of drawing as a medium for learning.
To understand drawing in the context of learning, it is more helpful to ask what is the drawing for, rather than what is the drawing of?
Drawing might be inspired by studentsʼ personal experience: drawing fixes experience in the memory, and can then act as an aide memoire, triggering thoughts and feelings that might otherwise be lost.
And also this lovely discussion about drawing in a paper by Anita Taylor ‘Why Drawing matters’.
Drawing enables us to navigate the world, literally. It sets a compass, maps direction, and extends our scope of understanding through a lexicon of visual language and material thinking.
I wonder what the purpose of this drawing was. There was a definite sense of enjoyment during the drawing, and a sense of pride with the end result. How was the content decided upon? Focus was sustained, certainly. Care was taken to represent animals differently and with some representation of key features to distinguish them. I love that many of the animals are drawn with the same standard building blocks, shapes, schema … with the added simple additions of stripes, or spots, or spiky hair, or a tail, to differentiate between them. If you talk to the artist, they will be able to tell you exactly what each animal represents.
The artist gave me permission to share the drawing on here, and offered me these answers to my questions…
Tell me all about your drawing…
I did it because there was lots of animals. There was a tortoise and there was a tall tall giraffe and I really liked them. There was orangutans with blankets on what looked really cute. I didn’t draw the blankets. There was a little guinea pig with a little town and they were really small and really cute.
What’s your favourite bit of your drawing?
My favourite bit of my drawing is the tiger…because I love its stripes
Are you pleased with your drawing of the zoo?
Yes
Find Adams’ paper , plus further drawing resources, here: https://www.nsead.org/resources/drawing/drawing-to-learn-learning-to-draw/
Taylor, A. (2020) Why drawing matters. in Drawing: Resarch, Theory, Practice, Vol 5, Issue 1, p5-10.